This coming season, Everyman Theatre will inaugurate The Upstairs Theatre, its new 210-seat performance space, with a three-play new play festival, against a backdrop of five classic plays on Everyman’s mainstage.
The new-play festival will feature an Everyman-commissioned new work by Calleen Sinnette Jennings, adding to her Queens Girl series with Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains, which explores Jacqueline Marie Butler’s college experiences in Vermont during the politically and culturally charged late sixties.
The Everyman season will open with David Auburn’s Proof, in which a professor of mathematics, bedeviled by mental illness, attempts desperately to solve an equation which has baffled mathematicians for centuries. After his death, his caretaker daughter Catherine — a brilliant and highly eccentric woman — claims that she has solved that equation. But did she? Or is she taking credit for her dead father’s accomplishment? Profound questions of authenticity, integrity, responsibility, mental illness and — yes — love are the meat of this play, which will run from September 3 to October 6, 2019. Paige Hernandez directs; Megan Anderson, who played Catherine in Everyman’s 2003 production, will play her dangerous older sister Claire in this one.
Next: the final play from the great August Wilson’s American Century cycle, also known as his Pittsburgh cycle: Radio Golf. A man seeking to become the first African-American mayor of Pittsburgh seeks to bring development to the Hill District. When one of the homeowners refuses to yield, he wants to build around the recalcitrant — but his partners have a different idea: brute force. “The crisp conversations crackle with humor. That dialogue and the relatively contemporary setting of the work (a 1997 Pittsburgh office) make Radio Golf among the most accessible and enjoyable of Wilson’s works,” said Steven McKnight in this 2009 review of a production at Studio Theatre. Carl Cofield directs; from October 15 to November 17 of this year.
[adsanity_rotating align=”aligncenter” time=”10″ group_id=”1455″ /]
You are traveling home to London from the Middle East, and you meet a gangster — a truly despised man, not just by the world at large, but, seemingly, by every other passenger on the train. Suddenly, he is murdered! But who did this semi-foul deed? Not you — you know that. But because you are Hercule Poirot, the greatest detective in human history, you must solve this crime. Yes, we are on the Orient Express, and in the hands of the masterful mystery writer Agatha Christie, but we are also in the hands of the famed farceur Ken Ludwig, and — well, if you remember what he did to Hound of the Baskervilles at Arena Stage a few years back, you know what to anticipate here. Murder on the Orient Express, December 3, 2019 to January 5, 2020; Everyman Artistic Director Vincent Lancisi directs.
Can things get worse than this? Bari has been fired from her job as a Professor of Nihilism — Nihilism! — and now she works in a shop selling knockoff Buddhas. Life is bleak; she has no interest in dating; she can’t finish her dissertation (on nihilism, natch) — and then she finds a magic bullet. Is it love? Religion? The purpose-driven life? No, it’s Geschwind’s Syndrome, an illness which subjects her to intense seizures of ecstasy and changes her whole outlook on life. And it’s accompanied by a life-threatening brain tumor. So the only thing that makes Bari happy is also killing her. The Palm Beach Artspaper’s Hap Epstein calls Be Here Now “a play for our time and, perhaps, for all time.” Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer directs this play, which will run from January 21 to February 16, 2020.
After that Everyman will move the action to its new performance space upstairs, which it describes as a “general admission house. It features a thrust stage, stadium seating, incredibly comfortable seats, and perfect sightlines—with no seat more than 6 rows from the stage. The new performance space offers more intimate encounters while upholding Everyman’s commitment to high-quality professional theatre.” Everyman’s resident set designer, Daniel Ettinger, designed the new space.
Everyman will kick things off in the new space with the world premiere of Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains, the third work in Calleen Sinnette Jennings’ Queens Girl series. Dawn Ursula reprises her role as Jacqueline Marie Butler, now in college among wealthy WASPs, militant African-Americans, and folks who are really, really, into theater. Once again, Paige Hernandez will direct. From March 3 to April 12 of next year.
A mysterious blues song called Berta, Berta provides the bones to Angela Chéri’s play of the same name. A man is going to Parchman Penitentiary, and he begs the woman he loves not to wait for him. But what has he done? And will she wait? Chéri’s play, which had its well-received debut in last year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival, tells a heartbreaking story in poetic language. “Chéri drenches her dialogue in the poetry of the earth to match the earthiness of the characters,” DCTS said in reviewing that production. “Berta sighs that Leroy smells of ‘sweaty sweet nothings’ which describes her old lover perfectly: he is a man who labors to bathe her in love, but who stubbornly remains just short of fully substantial.” Reginald L. Douglas, who directed the CATF production, will direct it again at Everyman. From March 17 to April 26, 2020.
Everyman closes the new play festival with Cry It Out, Molly Smith Meltzer’s story of two brand new mothers who struggle with their predictable and unpredictable adventures “The play’s candid talk surrounding motherhood is refreshing (if at times brutal — Jessie’s non-parent friends, for example, do not fare particularly well),” said Missy Frederick in this DCTS review, “and undoubtedly relatable to the mothers in the audience.” From March 31 to May 3 of next year; Lancisi directs.
The company will go downstairs for its final production of the season, the Clifford Odets classic Awake and Sing! The Berger Family seeks to live the American Dream, but they are just on this side of a nightmare as the Great Depression rages. Though three generations live under one roof, everything is disrupted by the prospective emergence of a fourth when a young, unmarried daughter becomes pregnant. “It’s amazing how topical something from the 1930’s feels and fits right here and now when it’s a classic,” DCTS’ Debbie Minter Jackson said in this review of a production five years ago. Noah Himmelstein directs; from May 26 to June 28, 2020.
If you’re interested in a season’s subscription, click here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.